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When you see the posters for Starz’ new drama series, Magic City (premiering at 10PM on Friday) you probably think something like wait, is this not Boardwalk Empire? Or, is that Denny from Grey’s Anatomy? Or, how many more shows are going to make me wish I lived in another time? We can answer the second one. Yes, that is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He plays Ike Evans, a smoldering (sometimes smarmy) owner of the fictitious Miramar Playa hotel in pre-Cuban Revolution Miami. The premise is hot, the southern temps balmy, but the show’s two young breakouts—Christian Cooke and Steven Strait, who play impossibly sexy brothers—absolutely smolder.

Photo: Starz

Name: Christian CookeAge: 24Provenance: North of England

Dating experience: Limited. “I went on a date in November, the first I’ve ever been on,” Cooke tells ELLE. “It was the first time I’d gone up to somebody and asked them out. It went pretty well!”

Size zeros need not apply. When it comes to modern archetypes of beauty, the actor thinks they had it right in the ’50s. “It’s a shame that girls today are so thin. Who ever said that guys found that more attractive?”

Favorite thing about Miami: The food! “We dabbled,” he says of his own Collins Ave. party pedigree. ”There was many a cocktail, but the restaurants are seriously great.”

Photo: IMDB

Name: Steven Strait Age: 26 Provenance: New York

Relationship Status: Married. “My wife loves the show,” Strait says of John Carter star Lynn Collins. Despite the racy scenes (“Starz has allowed more nudity and sex in Magic City than in almost anything else,” says The Hollywood Reporter), their union is unaffected by on-screen antics: “She’s an actress,” he tells ELLE, “so she probably understands a bit more than others just how unsexy it is to shoot a sex scene.”

Ladies Man? Not so much. “No!” he says when asked if he is similar playboy character, Stevie. “In terms of personal characteristics, he and I are completely dissimilar.”

Love at first sight? Totally. Defining the romantic theory as when, “You have to be there; you have to be with that person,” Strait confesses, “It is something I believe in.”